On: Waiting for Godot

As a fairly regular theatregoer I think about the reasons why I choose certain plays over others. I go, frequently, to be entertained and to do something which I know I usually enjoy. Sometimes, my choice is driven by the play. Sometimes it is motivated by the director. More often, I am inspired by the casting. On some occasions, I go, aware that I might not enjoy what I am watching, but knowing it will provoke me to think, to try to understand another person’s view and perhaps, to broaden my own.

This week I was up in the Gods peering down on Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati in ‘Waiting for Godot’, at Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Recently I re-watched both of them being brilliant in the BBC’s ‘The Hollow Crown’. I chose to see this, largely to see two of my favourite actors, but also because it is such a famous play. I went, anticipating, that it would be more of an ‘experience’ than ‘enjoyment’.

I last saw it, with an equally distinguished cast – Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow, Ronald Pickup – in 2009, at the same theatre, so this performance had been set quite a high bar, and yet, my recollection was that I had not really enjoyed that evening, because I had found it a ‘difficult’ play, and was pretty confident I had misunderstood it, notwithstanding that it is open to multiple interpretations. I went this time, believing it was existential; about purposelessness, and absurdity, and about time/temporality.

Understanding the play is perhaps not the point. The issue is more about what it makes us feel. The despair of the protagonists, the curious hope about being saved, the Biblical references, and the absurd intervention of the cruel Pozzo and the luckless ‘Lucky’. Trying to get a sense of what I might be missing, whilst appreciating that it is multi-layered, I turned afterwards to Wikipedia. The length of the entry is something of a clue in itself.

For those unfamiliar with the play, it opens with two tramp-like characters on an open bare place adorned by a solitary tree. They are, Vladimir (known as DiDi) and Estragon (nicknamed Gogo). They are waiting for a companion called Godot, but we come to learn that they are not sure of what he looks like. Their conversation is broken, formless and disconnected and yet we come to understand that there is quite a powerful friendship bond between them. They are coming back together, after Gogo has spent the night in a ditch, the victim of an assault by unnamed and unnumbered assailants. DiDi reminds him that he needs his companionship and care.

Gogo frets about his boots and about his pains and injuries and seems inclined to leave and pursue his goals alone, but somehow cannot, and accepts Didi’s instruction that they should wait for Godot, despite not knowing if they will recognise him if he appears. As they consider how best to pass the time, they are interrupted by a man carrying bags and with a rope around his neck, leading an imperious other man, who carries a whip. When they set down and introduce themselves, the well-dressed, Pozzo, as we learn he is, abuses his companion who seems to be mute, and calls him Pig. He makes him perform menial tasks and suggests he is taking him to a market to see if he can sell him.

This is uncomfortable viewing. All sorts of feelings about class, about slavery, serfdom, imprisonment, injustice, get to sweep around the audience until Lucky, as we learn he is ironically named, is made to dance and then to ‘think’. This produces a stream of fragmented, occasionally coherent, often absurd, consciousness, in an exhausting monologue that might be the best writing in the whole play. In this production, Tom Edden is outstanding givig the monlogue, and should win all ‘Supporting Actor’ awards that are on offer. For all my Whishaw and Msamati worship, he is worth the ticket price alone.

Pozzo and Lucky move on and our heroes are once more left trying to understand their roles in life, their relationship, and why they feel compelled to wait for Godot. The first Act ends with a young boy bringing a message that Godot cannot come, but will definitely be there tomorrow.

In the second Act, the heaviness of time and the sense of purposelessness return. The only difference is the tree has budded and we can see how the passage of time is often a good and hopeful thing. One hears the common phrase “time heals everything…” somewhere at the back of the mind. By contrast, Pozzo, now blinded, and Lucky, pass through on their return. Pozzo’s new dependence is a curious counterpoint to the independence that Didi and Gogo arguably enjoy.

The play ends with the reappearance of the boy, who denies he is the same boy, but has the same message. Gogo and Didi think about hanging themselves from the tree, ridiculing the idea of a ‘tree of life’, but conclude that they have no rope and the belt on Gogo’s trousers will not be suitable for the job.

A little more than a couple of hours after the play opens, one travels home with thoughts and feelings. Some critics think Beckett was sensitive to ageing and to mental health. Gogo continually forgets why they are where they are and has to be told by Didi that they are waiting for Godot. My father’s recent vascular dementia diagnosis made me sensitive to this part of the play. However, most of the play feels unsympathetic, especially Pozzo and Lucky, and yet I can see why one might be comforted by the ‘carer and cared for’, structure. Some suggest that Lucky suffers from Parkinson’s, as did Beckett’s mother.

Beckett was apparently frustrated by the link between God and Godot. He felt that there was too much religious interpretation. Nonetheless, the idea of waiting for a saviour, and of the Biblical references the waiting couple consider, meant I felt it had religious meaning.

As for psychoanalytic, I quite like the idea that the nicknames are plays on the idea that Estragon represents Ego, and the missing pleasure principle and is a man, keen to move on, seeking to avoid unpleasure. By contrast Vladimir/DiDi, represents the id, and the oppressive Godot, stands for an intolerant, never-satisfied Superego. However, I did not find myself feeling that I was watching such a representation of psyche.

The Jungian perspective is to think in terms of contrast. Lucky is Pozzo’s Shadow. Estragon, is the feminine of Vladimir, the anima. This was lost on me. I was more drawn to the idea of it being political – Beckett’s Irishness and his wartime experiences in France, mean that ideas of oppression and colonisation, of abuse, contempt and superiority are played with. That resonated with me, and was the core of my Pozzo/Lucky discomfort, I think.

The philosophical analysis, is that it nods favourably towards existentialism. In the play, this is mainly conveyed by Estragon, not sure why is waiting or for whom, and wondering if he would be better alone, and more strikingly, if he would not be better off dead. Existentialism is the question of life’s meaning, the role of death and the place of God. I find this interpretation closer to what was raised in me, especially the suggestion/question of religion’s place in a life with meaning.

I tend to prefer my theatre when it demands that I think, but when the thinking is demanding and obtuse it can mar the pleasure I get from the experience. When I saw the McKellen version, I am sure I failed to appreciate the play, but I am sure I enjoyed the acting. Here, some outstanding actors were so good, that I noticed them less and thought more about the playwright and the director. That said, I would no doubt recommend it for the acting, especially Edden’s.

When I am asked what I have seen recently and what I recommend, I will talk about this at some length, but I will temper and caveat any recommendation. I think it is a difficult play for those unfamiliar with it and the playwright. But if an evening of philosophising and analysis of oneself and one’s motives, is on your agenda – seek it out.

On: ‘Grenfell: in the words of survivors’

First. Please go and see this play. This is a verbatim play, made directly from the words of some survivors and bereaved of the Grenfell tragedy. Those words are put together by Gillian Slovo, who has been interviewing survivors for several years. It will bring up a number of emotions. The audience is invited to leave at any time that they might feel overwhelmed and there are counselling supporters on hand. I did not see anyone leave when I attended, but I felt the raw emotions rippling about, even as I got in touch and tried to manage my own.

Second. What does it mean to attend theatre? What do we seek? Sure, we want entertaining, but also we want connection – with ideas, with characters, and with the audience community. Theatre is a word with Greek origins. It has a meaning; something like ‘the witnessing place’. As an art form theatre works, because it requires and relies upon the imagination. What I witness and what you witness, when watching the same play, will be different things, because of the emotional responses we have, and the memories and belief systems with which we get in touch.

For me, theatre has always been as much about being asked to think, as about being entertained. Slovo’s verbatim play has affected me as much as any play that I can recall, alongside Ryan Calais Cameron’s ‘For Black Boys who have considered suicide when the hue gets heavy’ and Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy’s ‘The Jungle’, and maybe, Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s ‘Death of England’. I can see that there is an element of ‘state of the nation’ about each of these, but I think it reaches deeper. I think these are plays about humanity, about the joy and the burden of the fact that we are social animals.

Playwright Yasmina Reza wrote about theatre as “a mirror, a sharp reflection of society”, based on something provided by the greatest playwright, Shakespeare, spoken through the words of perhaps his greatest creation, Hamlet. Hamlet uses the players who have come to his usurping father-in-law’s court, “To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” Slovo’s use of verbatim holds a mirror up to each of us, as we digest the words, the feelings and as we catch our own reactions. I found myself hoping that Bertolt Brecht is held in mind by departing audience members: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’

For the performance I witnessed at the Dorfman, the cast was exemplary. Invidious though it might be to single out players, I want to mention Michael Schaeffer as Ed Daffarn, Ash Hunter as Nick Burton, Houda Echouafni as Rabia Yahya, and Sarah Slimani as Hanan Wahabi. I do it, because in a superb ensemble piece, they somehow provoked the deepest feelings within me. It will be different actors and different stories that most affect and resonate with others.

When it opens the cast walk on a bare unadorned stage in the middle of the audience, a structure and staging that reminded me of ‘The Jungle’, and they introduce themselves, and then explain the person they are representing, the person and survivor of the horror, whose words they are inviting us to weigh, and to weigh very carefully. It becomes very tender and very intimate, very quickly.

After the introductions, and talking about the pre-fire Grenfell as a social hub and a community, the players invite the audience to introduce themselves to a stranger sat close by. I was sat with two young black girls, Essaya and Daniella, who told me that they were sisters. Essaya said “ooh, it’s like church”. She then revealed, almost like a confession, that they no longer attended church, and giggled at what she seemed to think I might interpret as transgressive behaviour. It lasts barely a minute and somehow heightens audience feeling. Well, it did mine.

The performance has three parts – an introduction to the tenants and to some of their backstories, about being found a flat in the tower, and about the lives they led. Voices that are heard are Syrian, Italian, Portuguese, Ethiopian, English and we learn of romances developed, children born and raised, and friendships forged.

Alongside, is the story of the Labour councillor, an outlier on the very Tory-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and a reminder of the ideological struggles playing out in national politics. We are taken back in time to watch a speech by David Cameron, with the ominous messaging about the need to ‘deregulate’ and the demonisation of ‘red tape’ and bureaucracy. The word outsourcing does not come up, but we hear terms like KPI and we become aware of an evolving dehumanisation.

The middle part of the play deals with the timeline of the fire and of the calls to emergency services, the responses, individual and institutional, and a chance to consider the ‘stay put’ policy. It is interwoven with the interactions that took place in the public inquiry, initiated by Prime Minister May, which informs us about the design of the cladding, the aluminium composite that acted as a “fuel”, the timing of the ‘refurbishment’ of the tower and manages to expose the strategies of the businesses, consultancies and contractors that the Royal Borough sourced.

The final part is a filmed response from many of the survivors we have watched being represented by the actors. They talk about justice and try to rationalise what to do with the grief and trauma. Many are still marginalised and poorly represented.

So, it is a lot to digest in three hours. There is a powerful juxtaposition for theatregoers at the National right now. Next door, playing in the Olivier, is the fabulous ‘Dear England’. This is James Graham’s marvellously uplifting play that hangs on the letter that coach, Gareth Southgate, penned to and for, the nation. It is much lighter-hearted than its neighbour at the Dorfman, but themes of integration, of race and racism, of national identity, of inclusiveness and of ‘othering’, and above all, an examination of the national psyche are relevant to both.

Two mirrors. Time to reflect.

On: Masculinity

This week I shall see the adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, ‘A Little Life’ at the theatre, under the direction of Ivo van Hove. FT critic, Sarah Hemmings, wrote an excellent review last week. She also reviewed ‘For Black Boys who have considered suicide when the hue gets heavy’, after its West End transfer. I was lucky enough to see it at the Royal Court, and I think it is one of the finest things I have seen in forty years of theatre-going. What both plays have in common is a perspective on, and often, an analysis of masculinity. This is a subject appearing more frequently in the print media currently.

I confess to nowadays expecting the word masculinity to always be immediately preceded by the word toxic, and I wondered why I was thinking like that and why the idea of discussing masculinity made me wince inwardly. To someone who is a father of a son and hopes to be a grandfather, these things are important. Why do we revere warriors, and why do we need to test masculinity with initiation ceremonies or intimidating hazings?

I think it may be that I perceive that exalting masculinity is aligned with social forces that aim to undermine gender equity. As a father of two fiercely independent women, I might be associating masculinity with a regressive approach to feminists and feminism. It certainly had me thinking.

‘For Black Boys…’ addresses a kind of toxic ‘hyper-masculinity’ for six black men who are meeting in group therapy. They act, and talk out, everything from being racially profiled by police, to absorbing the trauma of an abusive father. Sex is fundamental – a need to meet an idea of performance, to finding room for a black interpretation of masculinity in a queer man. Fashion, sex, food and father-figures get examined in relation with blackness and with masculinity.

‘A Little Life’ is a dark tour through masculinity as abusive, including against the self, but also of its positive power of collaboration, support, brotherhood (usually best represented in war movies and especially good in ‘1917’ and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’), and of the importance of the father figure. In the novel/play, the absence of a protective father as a model is critical, and the lack of it is emphasised by the appearance of the lead figure, played in the play by James Norton, being adopted by a man who represents all that is best about being masculine.

Unfortunately, his love is too unfamiliar to the abused adopted son, and of course, gets rejected, repeatedly. The rejection might also be a rejection of gentleness and love as concepts, because masculinity is often associated with aggression. Mance quotes feminist writer, bell hooks, who claimed that, “Patriarchy demands (that) they kill off the emotional parts of themselves”. Even Freud thought of masculine in terms of being active and feminine in terms of being passive.

Examining masculinity feels a bit zeitgeist at the moment, something emphasised for me by a long, and good, essay in the Weekend FT, from journalist Henry Mance, which appeared a few weeks after a piece by Susie Orbach in the Guardian; albeit it is now over ten years since writer Hanna Rosin published “The End of Men”. In his essay, Mance is focused on the difficulties for young males negotiating the online world. Both Orbach and Mance namecheck Andrew Tate in their opening paragraphs. Does Tate represent masculinity? He celebrates war, aggression (especially against women) and competition. If he does not represent me, am I somehow sub-masculine? He maintains that wives are the ‘property’ of husbands and that mental weakness, specifically depression, isn’t ‘real’.

Mance compares what boys of today, in the online world, absorb when thinking about the sort of men they want to become, with his own youth. He is younger than me so his reference points on ‘lad mags’ such as ‘Loaded’ and ‘FHM’ were not influencers to me. Sexism and homophobia were still rife, in print and especially in what passed for humour. Mance cites Frank Skinner’s routines – routines Skinner now says he regrets. For my generation, whatever was felt about skin colours, there was a general acceptance of a certain manliness about the black man. A rather unpleasant ‘slavery chic’, that paid a kind of tribute to the mute pride and insolence of a figure like Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte.

That was interrupted by the homophobic slur cast upon one of the greatest athletes of all time, Carl Lewis. Athleticism, alongside pugilism, was manly and masculine, but Daley Thomson, possibly this country’s greatest ever all-round athlete, and a man of mixed race heritage, unveiled a T-shirt at the LA Olympics, which said “Is the world’s second greatest athlete gay?” Thompson claimed the ‘second greatest’ could be several candidates, but the media and the public assumed he meant Lewis. It was a confusing time. How would I respond today?

Mance asserts that young males and youths today claim that they trust ‘influencers’ such as figures like Tate, more than newspapers or other social media. I cannot help but feel that the Gove-ish demeaning of ‘experts’ is echoed here. It begs the question of whether an intellectual, or a poet, can be perceived as masculine. Our poet laureate, in his brilliant podcast broadcast from his shed, strikes me as profoundly masculine, with his reverence for the wildness of nature, but I doubt that is a view widely shared. Would a modern-day intellectual, and a pacifist to boot, like Bertrand Russell, be revered today, or widely mocked?

Orbach wrote that “a return to a “boys will be boys” ethos hasn’t offered masculinity the pleasures of knowing oneself more fully or expanding what masculinities can be. The “crisis” of masculinity was reformulated into a new machismo”. She thought about how machismo is often aligned with putting “us women in our place”, but made it clear that “that ship has sailed”. Her wish is to promote more conversation, more thinking, something that “opens the door to speaking of vulnerability and nurture”.

I welcome that, but I want to get back to understanding why I felt uncomfortable thinking about masculinity. In short, do I want to be thought of as exhibiting a strong sense of masculinity? I know I did as a teenager, the sort of impressionable minds that Mance was considering. My worlds of television, cinema and sports exalted the masculine. Sometimes subtly, (the hero gets the girl) sometimes less so; sporting contests were about contrasts between two sportsmen, one of whom was portrayed as more masculine.

I think of Coe and Ovett, of the treatment of the Australian cricket captain, Kim Hughes, of Borg and Connors and also, the difficulty the British media seemed to have in treating outstanding sportsmen like John Curry, Robin Cousins and Christopher Dean as on a par with footballers, rugby stars and cricketers. Football-mad boys, like me, were encouraged to admire men like George Best, Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington, notwithstanding the difficulties these men often had off the pitch.

And now? I wondered if exuding masculinity was attractive, or is it now something associated with boorishness, thugishness, with an imbalance of brawn over brain? One of my daughters thought that when she thought of masculinity, she thought of physique, of a man who had a muscular body. Perhaps it is more aesthetic, than simply an aggressive psyche.

What masculinity means is not a new subject. I was fascinated to learn that my future son-in-law had written a dissertation about masculinity, a few years ago, specifically the representation of it by each different actor playing James Bond. The same character and yet different perceptions of being masculine. There may be something in this. My sense of the masculine was partly formed by two actors in old films, because of the way they represented their characters. They are Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men” and Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I thought that being able to swim against the tide of opinion, to stand up for right over wrong, to accept the contempt of people around you, was truly manly.

My interest in psychoanalytic theory is usually concentrated in Freud, and his “Three Essays on Sexuality’ offer plenty on the subject of masculinity, but it is his some-time collaborator and then rival, Jung, who is especially astute about gendering, I think:-

“No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have – carefully guarded and hidden – a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as ‘feminine’. A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be ‘mannish’. The repression of feminine traits and inclinations clearly causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious.”

What is interesting is how aggression, perceived as masculine, is often a projection against the part of the other that we do not like about ourselves. This is the root of homophobia and also of an idealisation (Mr Tate) of the masculine attitude. The more I have considered the concept of masculinity, the more confused I am about how I would define it, and how masculine I would want to be seen to be. I would reject an Andrew Tate masculine view, but I hope he is extremist and inconsequential, but I note what Henry Mance reports about the reach of online influencers. Perhaps it needs more debate. Fortunately some excellent playwrights are on the case and I look forward to seeing what gets represented this week.